"A shockingly cynical picture". In the light of this comment, discuss the Wife of Bath's account of her marriages to her first three husbands. In your response, you should consider:

Furthermore, we are made aware of the wife’s materialistic and debased view of marriage. She admits that having secured “hir lond and hir tresor” she no longer felt the need to “doon hem reverence” or “do lenger diligence/To winne hir love”. This demonstrates the wife’s willingness to use marriage to secure material wealth and establish her own social status. For her, it is essentially a source of material gain. The wife was not concerned about whether or not her husbands were fulfilled in their marriages but was purely interested in herself. This is especially apparent when she tells us that she would not “plese” them unless it were for her own “profit” or “ese”. In fact, we go on to learn that in order to obtain money from her husbands she would demand payment for her sexual favours: “I wolde no lenger in the bed abyde....til he had maad his rauson unto me”. The parallel with prostitution is evident and reinforces the link which the wife makes between love and commerce. The sanctity of marriage is therefore being undermined. However, this does not matter to the wife. She simply cares about her own personal gain.

In addition to her materialistic nature, it is clear that the wife is a cunning and deceitful woman. She falsely accuses the husbands of various misdemeanours such as lechery with the neighbour’s wife and maid, suspecting her relations with the apprentince Jankin and uttering all sorts of curses and complaints against wives. The cunningness of all this lies in the fact that she insists, with Jankin and her niece as her witnesses, that they behaved like this “in hir dronkenesse”. Her husbands therefore felt guilty and she was able to manipulate them. The wife even admits that they were “ful gilteless” which clearly shows that she feels no remorse for her deceptive behaviour. The wife’s strategy for manipulating her husbands in this way can be seen in the metaphor: “Whoso that first to mille comth, first grint”. In leaping into the attack first she secured as much freedom as possible for herself. All this brings to light the wife’s crafty character and her fierce determination to live life as she chooses.

Furthermore, it must be said that the wife does not see marriage as an equal and loving partnership and can certainly not bear to be dominated by her husband. In her view, only one can be in charge:

Oon of us two moste bowen, douteless;

And sith a man is moore reasonable

Than woman is, ye moste been suffrable

The wife clearly believes that in a marriage man ought to give way to woman. This can be seen in the animal imagery prevalent in the poem. The wife likens herself to a male horse that could “bite and whine” in order to reinforce her masculine, aggressive qualities. She is by no means the typical subdued and obedient wife one would expect to find in fourteenth century England. On the other hand, the wife told her husband that he should be like their sheep Wilkin, “pacient and meek”. Thus, the wife reverses the traditional viewpoint of man and wife. She wanted to possess “sovereinetee” in her relationships and to make her husbands subdued and placid. All of this shows that marriage did not thwart her independence in the past and that she is determined to keep it that way.

On the whole, we can see that the account offered by the Wife of Bath illustrates a shockingly cynical view of her marriages. She is a bold and independent character, atypical of a medieval housewife, who displays a cold and totally self-interested attitude towards her husbands. In essence, she shocks but at the same intrigues us.